


Watch the Throne

by brittlelimbs



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (eventual) - Freeform, Abusive Relationships, Emperor Hux, F/M, Hate Sex, Jealousy, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Pregnancy, Violence, concubine rey, consort ren
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-23 13:05:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6117343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The tale of the mad Emperor Hux, his two sullen consorts, and the mixed-up thing they share between them-- it might be love. He isn't precisely sure. </p><p> AKA Ren's an awkward virgin, Rey's gone completely darkside, and Hux takes both of them as his wives. Lots of possessive behavior and angst. Love-triangle dynamics. Hux-ish POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Emperor Brendol Hux is surely a tyrant.

He grins to himself with the sheer giddiness of the idea. It’s true; he’s precisely that word and everything it embodies, _tyrannical_ in every sense, and oh, how he wishes that his father could see him, now. Walking around the halls of his great weapon, half-hard under his fine coat and medals, pulsing with nothing more than the headiness of power. He is the most important man in the universe, its architect, its father and forebearer. His very breath is incense.

The first order of business, according to Hux’s new methodical restructuring of the universe, is to kill the hand that crowned him. He eats Snoke’s crumbling dynasty alive, swallows it whole, destroys the ancient power in favor of the new. Gone are the days of decrepit old men, Palpatine’s soft, white hands, Snoke’s asthmatic lungs. The galaxy has a fresh governing body, and it’s scant thirty years old, glowingly healthy, virile and strong.

The second order of business, naturally, involves one particular First Knight of Ren. He takes Ren as his consort immediately; it’s the next logical step in their relationship, and only need be affirmed by some pedantic paperwork, something simple enough to be tasked to his notary with the wave of a hand. Their names, twined together in Empirical script, hand lettered on thick, ivory paper of a binding document. It’s ridiculously easy to have him installed in Starkiller’s imperial suites, too, a few extra black robes in the wardrobe _here_ and Vader’s kriffing creepy helmet _there._ Ren doesn’t exactly have much, in the way of things. It pleases Hux. The Emperor and his Hound, perfect and compatible in all ways, including their quarters. Ren’s a little wet behind the ears in bed, which comes as a bit of a surprise, but Hux finds perfection in that, too, the uncertain hands, the sudden, tender insecurity. Kylo Ren: Sith Lord, trembling virgin. Hux is a benevolent king; he may rule with an iron fist, but this, Ren’s purity, is a soft concession that he takes pleasure in indulging, teaching, taking.

And then, seeded in amongst the silky order of his newly constructed world, the thorn:

Rey is stark, brutal, with all the gravity of a snuffed-out flame, and the egalitarian beauty of a well-executed plan. She rarely smiles; Hux doesn’t mind. Thinks she’d be a wonderful asset, in fact, if she hadn’t somehow bewitched his Hound beyond all reason.

Hux winesses the birth of something, there, watching training exercises from the observation deck over a datapad and tea. The way Ren crowds her during training, blankets her tiny body completely with his own while they spar, ordering her tight to his side as they stalk down the halls, twin in their darkness. Some might read this closeness as nothing more sinister than the dynamic between a devoted master and his faithful student, but Hux knows. He can read people better than most, _no_ , better than anyone—that’s how he got here, after all. The circlet on his head was won in the microcosm of furtive hands, whispered affections, subtle glances from the corners of eyes. Hux watches as they dance around each other, Ren’s awkward, hamfisted attempts at courtship, and certainly, the Hound savors his new apprentice above all things.

So one night, face buried in the softness of Ren’s raven hair, Hux decides that he’ll take the bait. He’ll bite. He formulates a little sort of game that quickly becomes the most entertaining thing he’s done in the months since his coronation; though General Hux might have frowned at the idea, favoring something a little more blunt (like: _I love you. You’re mine_. _Please don’t love her, gods, please don’t--_ ), Emperor Hux is nothing, if not petty.

He calls Rey to his offices one morning during a lull between meetings. He doesn't need a reason, nothing more than a quick message to Ren’s comm— _send the girl_ , he says, and he does.

When she appears at his door, she’s sweaty from running. Obedient, perfect.

 

If Ren notices the fat, blue-bruised hickeys ‘round her neck when Hux returns her, he doesn’t mention it in bed that evening. Simply folds himself around his Emperor, dutifully tucks his chin over one freckled shoulder, an echo of a dozen other nights.

So Hux grows bolder.

The next week, he sends her back with red-swollen lips and flushed cheeks, painfully, _sinfully_ , obvious and used-looking.

The week after, handprints circled around her biceps.

Then scratches, bruised bites, across her exposed shoulders.

Ren is stoic as ever, conscientious in his care of Hux, and still just as exquisitely responsive when his emperor beds him. Hux starts sending both master and apprentice to train with the same sets of lovebites, if to do nothing more than embarrass them when they’ve stripped down to sparring gear.

Days pass, and Hux is getting bored. And then, sudden as a lightning strike-- betrayal!

When his informant tells him about the kiss, Hux strangles the officer, rising from behind his stately desk to fist his fingers in fine, grey cloth, nearly lifting him plumb off the ground in his anger.

“What was it like,” he says, voice low and frostbitten. _What kind of look did he have in his eyes._ What did Ren feel when he broke his troth, betrayed his Lord. His hands tremble with excitement.

The officer’s foaming at the mouth, eyes nearly rolled back in his head with the fearsome image of Hux at his most god-like and terrible, stammering something along the lines of _wasn’t me who saw, it wasn’t me_!

After sanitation has cleared the office of the body, a woman appears. A maintenance cadet. Ren had cornered Rey, she tells him, abstract within the limits of her own stunted romantic vocabulary, but Hux gathers that it had been a quick, messy, desperate thing; Ren knows the exact nature of his betrayal, but for the life of him, can’t seem to _stop_.

 

When Hux sends Rey to her master the next afternoon, she’s well-fucked, glassy eyed, flushed with the feeling of Hux’s come leaking out from between her legs, walking with a stiff-stilted stride.

 

That night, in soft pool of their sprawling bed, Hux wakes to a sound. Ren’s voice. His eyes fly open, instantly awake. It’ so late—past three, he’d wager, but Ren’s there, standing over him, a dark, still figure staring down at Hux as if he’s thousands of miles away, not waiting for Ren to join him in bed. Armor winks in the artificial moonlight, and Hux realizes that he’s still in his training leathers.

“She can’t train like this,” Ren says again. It’s too dark for Hux to see his face.

“Haven’t the faintest, dear one,” Hux says, pretending to cover a yawn with his bare forearm, a smile at his lips. _Yes. Yes!_

“Yes, you do.”

“What you do with your apprentice is of no concern to me,” Hux says, feigning disinterest as he rolls onto his belly, pretending to check the time. “Fuck. It’s four in the morning, Ren. You should’ve been in bed long ago.”

“My Lord,” — _oh_ , but Hux could never tire of hearing his title on that tongue—“I’m completely serious. The state she’s in after your _meetings_ \-- It’s honestly unacceptable. How am I expected to train her, make her stronger. She can barely fucking _stand_.” His voice goes deliciously plaintive at the end, and Hux works his fingers into the creamy, decadent linens, knotting himself in place, lest he float away. He chooses to say nothing, letting the cool night air drift across his naked back.

Silence.

“So that’s it, then. No apology. No fucking explanations. I’ll have to revise my lesson plan, then.” Ren’s voice is unsatisfyingly flat, and Hux hears the rustle of his shifting weight; he’s making to go to the fresher. To go away, pout under the steam and recycled water. Leave Hux, cold and lonely and disappointed. Maybe he has been too soft on his Hound, too wrapped up in nurturing his inexperience to hone his fire—where’s the fight in him?

Ren’s footsteps echo in the high ceilings of the majestic suite.

“Disloyal,” Hux says, contemplating his pillow, just loud enough that Ren should hear it. The steps pause. Hux smiles into the sheets.

“What did you say?” His voice is quiet.

“Suppose I should expect it, though. From you. ”

Ren’s returning, footsteps suddenly dampened by thick pile carped.

“You were only ever Snoke’s, Ren,” Hux sighs. “We both know it. You…belonged to that old man. And still do. I—“

Ren’s hand is rough on his bicep as he grabs Hux, flipping him onto his back with a yank that makes Hux’s shoulder suck at the socket, painfully close to dislocating. His head lolls against the pillow, contemplating the hot mess he’s so artfully created. There it is, in Ren’s trembling chin, the wetness in his eyes. Hux peeks his tongue out from between his teeth, lets his muscles go lax; _now_ he has Ren. All of him.

“ _What_ was that, my Lord?” His voice is sickly sweet.

“Or maybe it’s the girl. Who keeps you, I mean. ” Quick, concise, to the heart of it.

Ren bares his teeth, hisses. Hux wonders if he could come from this, purely from how good this feels. He laughs.

“Pathetic,” Hux repeats. “Owned. Can’t fuck right, can’t love right. Can’t do anything hallway decently at all. More _boy_ than man.” He spits that one out for good measure, clinging harder to Ren’s arm, pulling him closer still.

“Shut up _shut UP_!” Ren roars. His grip on his Hux’s arm is crushing the bones together. He’s trembling on the incisive edge of absolutely, irrevocably losing his shit.

Hux slaps him.

Ren rears back with all the heaving terror of a spooked stallion, the meaty, clean sound ringing everywhere; there’s blood on his cheek, black in the blue of the night, from where Hux’s silver ring sliced him open.

“You think she’d ever love you back, the way you love her?” Hux says, rising to his knees to crowd in, kindle his Hound ever higher. “Do you? Think about it, Ren. Think really, _really_ , hard. If you can do that and breathe at the same time, fucking brain-dead. Fucking st—“

Hux hasn’t been hit that hard in months. Years, maybe; the kind of blow that starbursts everything to white with the pain, loosens his molars. There’s something distinctly Brendol Hux the Senior in the way Ren hits him, the wicked strength in those big hands, and Hux feels a little nostalgic as he writhes against the sheets, blood dribbling from his lips.

The room is tilting on its axis—Hux knows a concussion when he feels one—and it takes him a minute to come back to himself; suddenly, Ren’s hands are everywhere, touching as lightly as he dares.

“Oh, _gods_ , Hux. I—“

Does he touch Rey with those gentle fingers, treat her like something that’ll break if he pushes too hard, too fast? Hux slaps them away with one hand, massaging at the pressure points under his brow bone with the other. No, no. This is not what he needs.

“Was I the one who made you so soft?” He asks as the room finally stabilizes, looking up through his lashes at Ren, coquettish. It’s an honest question. His words are slurred with swollen lips.

Ren balks, and this isn’t what Hux wanted, not at all. But Ren, he’s learned, is usually taught best with physical stimuli.

Without warning, Hux lashes out with a naked heel, then forearm. Ren counters him, growls, and then, all at once, seven years of academy training is shaking the dust from Hux’s shoulders: this is becoming a _fight_. It’s—odd. But completely thrilling, too; Hux has always had his wires crossed this way, some neurological switch-path between pleasure and pain. He used to be ashamed of it, back then, before. Fucked in the head. Now: Ren’s burning up, and no being alive could tell Hux that the arousal he feels, the way his dick fills in reflexive response to the taste of blood in his mouth, is anything but exactly as it should be.

The fight isn’t fair. Hux is fucking _naked_ , for starssake, up against this towering, dark thing that’s much too fast and tall for its own good. Ren must be six feet, no, seven, _eight_ , as he tries to pin his Emperor to their bed, hair spilling in his eyes as he leans in long, whole bodyweight behind him, baring down on grip he’s got on Hux’s wrists. It’s cutting his circulation off, and Hux’s hands are starting to fuzz with pins and needles. Then:

“Fucking _freak_!”

Ren’s eyes have sifted down, stuck themselves firmly to Hux’s cock; it’s deeply flushed, leaking against his belly, hard beyond any kind of rationality. Ren suddenly looks reviled, like he’s ready to launch himself to the next star system just to escape the monster beneath him.

But there, in equal turns, Ren looks terribly _aroused_ , pupils blown, like he remembers how Hux had taken him on these very sheets that morning, screaming his pleasure into the pillows.

It’s an opening; Hux uses it to drive his knee solidly into that heaving belly. The fight isn’t fair, but that’s not how Hux fights. Never has been. If confusion is the means, so be it. Ren will learn to appreciate this kind of love. The kind that will stand up and bite him. 

The dynamic has shifted, now, Ren winded, Hux rising, and the dance begins again; over, under, the artificial, textured roughness of Ren’s harness and training gear, the supple leather of his gloves, scraping his glowingly milky skin and glinting dully in the silver light. Hux’s concussed mind whirls onwards in the delirium, flying on his jacked-up pulse, the idea that this man could, in a very real and meaningful way, kill him if he wanted. He’s big enough to do it, crack Hux’s scull, crush his tinny windpipe. There are no cameras here; nobody would know until they found the body, naked, glutted on his own masochism.

“You’re getting— _ngh_ —blood on the sheets,” Hux grunts out, trying, desperately, to break Ren’s hold. It’s true; they both are, his cheek and Hux’s mouth, droplets twining in the linen.

“God, _please, shut up_ ,” Ren implores, again.

And then they don’t speak, no room for language between the yelps and grunts and deep breaths through gritted teeth, too gone on chasing the idea that they might, _might_ , be able to hurt one another in a way that mattered

.

It ends, precisely the way Hux ordains it to. Of course it does. Once they’re nice and ready, formed into heaving, frothing beasts by the exertion and adrenaline, both salt-slick with sweat, wild-eyed with it. Ren gets the final upper hand, tented over him, and it affords Hux a gorgeous view of his Hound in full glory; Ren is truest to himself when he he’s going to gore you, Hux thinks. _Rey never sees this. Rey doesn’t know_.

Ren’s got him pinned down again, wrist and shoulder and thigh, no leeway for any kind of wiggle room, no leeway to _breathe_ , they’re so close together that Hux blows a piece of hair out of his eyes, watches Ren’s dark curls sway in response. Just a few crammed inches between, keeping the boundary between fight and fuck defined. But only narrowly so; the tight space is all heat and neediness.

So Hux enacts his plan to close it.

The smirk. _The_ smirk, an old practice born in corridors as they passed each other, shoulder brushing decorated shoulder, champing for the same glory and approval. An old relic of their rivalry. Hux knows Ren, and therefore knows this: there is nothing in the universe that gets this man’s blood boiling hotter than when Hux smiles, just like that.

It just takes just the slightest roll of his hips, the only motion he’s allowed, and Ren knows—Hux almost crows with it, how perfectly in tune they are with each other. A brief cessation of pressure; Hux is flipped, coppery mouth suddenly full of the sheets, and then Ren’s forearm is braced across Hux’s back, tempered plastic guard digging into his tender skin with all the weight of that huge body. Down below, the soft clinking sound of a belt being unbuckled, the slither as it slides aside, the whispers of hook-and-eye fastenings being undone, fly unzipped. Hux groans before he can stop himself. A perfect aphrodisiac.

“Quiet,” Ren says, and for once, Hux is. He’s scared speechless: the hot line being draped across the swell of his ass, sprung from Ren’s smallclothes-- was it always this fucking _enormous?_ Ren adjusts himself, sliding further up into the tender curve of Hux’s lower back, and oh, gods, but Hux had never really thought about the exact technicality of this. He’d seen Ren’s dick enough, certainly, hefted it in his hands and mouth with enough skill to bring his Hound to tears, but had never thought of it in terms of—this. This had not happened before.

Ren leans over him, somehow even heavier as he reaches over Hux for something, the merciful _snick_ of a lid, the wet slide as he slicks himself up.

And then, as such, Emperor Hux is taken.

 

He shudders around each piled-in inch, pushing against the hand pressed to the back of his neck, holding him down, restraining him as if he were a feral animal. The other one’s bruise-tight around his slender hip, feeding Ren into him, keeping him from squirming away. It goes on and on, for an impossibly long time; it’s been a while since he’s done this, and Hux is already feeling so _full_ , grabbing at the sheets with two desperate hands as, above him, Ren breathes in short, tight snorts through his nose. It occurs to Hux, somewhere halfway through, that this is, quite likely, Ren’s first time sticking his dick in anyone. Ren’s virginity, claimed in a different sense. Hux should feel pride; instead, he’s simply struggling to _breathe_ around the size of this man, how thoroughly and completely the hot press fills him up.

It’s utterly overwhelming and excruciatingly painful and Hux never, ever wants it to stop.

And then Ren does—but that’s his MO, isn’t it, never one to fully obey Hux, always _just_ this side of getting on his nerves. Ren pauses, and there’s an odd stillness, him no longer coaxing in the inches, Hux no longer taking them. Just panting into the nape of Hux’s neck, breathing through their tangled heartbeats. Like, suddenly, he’s thinking too hard. Hux doesn't want that.

He wriggles impatiently, popping his hips up, trying to maneuver his way further down Ren’s irritatingly massive cock. He doesn’t make much headway; Ren stops him with nothing more than the hand on his hip. Hux keens. He’s realized, too late, that he wants a good fuck more than he’s wanted anything in a long while, and Ren _is denying him of it._

“Ren,” he grits out, fists clenching and unclenching in the sheets. “What’re you doing.”

Ren is silent, save for his breathing. Hux resists the urge to roll his eyes; he’s getting all cerebral on him. Scared.

“Kylo Ren. Fuck me,” Hux tries to buck up against him again. “As your kriffing Emperor, I _command_ you to.”

“You really think that matters, here?” Ren says quietly, making no movie to continue. His anger sounds like it’s wilting on its lips. Oh, what Hux would give to be able to turn around, slap that moody scowl one more time. Of course it matters; it always matters. There is not one moment in which Hux is not Ren’s Emperor, and Ren is not his Hound. Even when he’s speared about halfway down his cock.

“It matters. It always matters. You’d d-do well not to forget it" And then: _"Ben_.”

Then there are two hands on his hips, and, in one hot second, Hux’s uncomfortable fullness is utterly _unbearabl_ e; Ren’s all the way in. Slid himself up to the hilt with one burning push, bending Hux nearly in two in the process. Tears blur in Hux’s eyes and he swallows down a sob, face crushed into the sheets, but he’s given no quarter; before he can get a breath in edgewise, Ren is smoothly drawing back, pounding in again, setting the brutal pace that Hux needs. All too soon, Hux is loosing his grip, and each thrust punches a little pathetic, breathy groan from deep inside his lungs. Ren stays silent, the most singularly important being in the universe, the man to whom he’s sworn in service and body and blood, split on the girth of him. Trembling, at his mercy.

Soon, Ren gathers Hux up to himself, blanketing across his pale back, trying, greedily, to get deeper. The angle’s all wrong, only brushing his sweet spot on every fourth or fifth stroke, because Ren doesn't know how to do this yet, won’t stop clinging to Hux like he’s fucking him into nonexistence (which he very well might be) but needs him, paradoxically, to stay. Hazily, Hux knows that he can’t come from this alone, but that’s not the primary objective here; when Ren tries to reach around with a trembling hand, bring Hux off with brusque, clumsy strokes, Hux pushes him away. No, _no_ , this is about Ren. Not about his dogged sense of dilignce, his servitude. This is about pulling in Ren, sinking in his hooks so deep into his Hound that they’ll never come out. This is about beating _her_.

Ren comes with a shout, holding their hips flush, grinding down and down as if the two of them aren’t nearly close enough, and Hux is so full and so happy that he thinks he might split from his very skin. Thinks he might die.

But he doesn’t; Ren lays there, huge, immobile, crushing Hux for a wonderful minute as they gather up the pieces of themselves in gulping breaths, heaving chests. Then he leaves. Pulls out, sweaty skin peeling away from Hux’s back, not bothering to zip himself up or tuck himself in. Just like that.

Hux brings himself off as he listens to the fresher running. He’s thinking of Rey as he spills in his hand, victorious. 

 

The next day—rather, later that same day, after showers and lots of caf and bacta for their petty wounds—Hux deftly excuses himself from lunch with a visiting dignitary to check on Ren, as is his habit. His palms are sweating insid his gloves; he’s been twitchy and anxious all day, wanting to see the bandage on that face, the delicate flush that will rise when he sees Hux, remembers the wee hours of this morning. How truly wonderful they were together, how perfect.

He waits by the exit, propping himself up on a nearby wall. A patrol marches by, and several troopers heads rudely swivel around to watch him. He supposes that he _does_ look a little odd. No matter--Ren is due any minute now, heading to the mess to take his lunch with his apprentice at his side. It’s integral to their master-pupil relationship, apparently, that they spend meals together. Hux calls bullshit, but can’t deny that the girl is getting better by the day.

Finally, after several false starts and a handful of awkward _oh! Your majesty_ ’s from some startled laymen, they arrive. Ren is wearing a dark tunic instead of his normal armor, and the weave of it is rough in Hux’s hand when he reaches out to grab Ren’s shoulder.

“Lord,” Rey greets, emerging from Ren’s other side, hair plastered to the sides of her head with drying sweat. He spares her a glance, then looks to his Hound, and – _what?_

Hux’s stomach does a sickly somersault; Ren’s looking _through_ him in a way he never has before. No flush, no fidigit, no anger nor embarrassment nor any of those wonderful, frustrating little parts of Ren that Hux has come to cherish. Just—slate blank. Absent, remote.

“Lord,” Ren says. He should sound like a droid, but, somehow, he doesn’t, the subtle textures in the timbre of that beautiful, deep base a cruel reminder of what Hux had. The man who was—no, is, _is!—_ his own.

Hux is thoroughly unhinged. He grips at the sides of Ren’s head, tangling his fingers in that lush hair so that he might better examine him, not caring that they’re in the middle of the open hallway, not caring about the stares of the nearby officers, the stare of Rey. They can go fuck themselves. They are below this. The order of Hux’s galaxy has been disrupted: Ren, his consort, a person who is, by definition, every piece completely his, has gone somewhere else.

A place to which Hux cannot follow.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is more of an interlude chapter-- i decided to switch POVs for the next part, but instead of deleting this, i thought i'd post it for anyone interested!

Hux is decidedly _not_ sick.

Emperors simply don’t get sick, he tells himself, stumbling into his spacious fresher, groggy and sickeningly disoriented. Or, at least, that’s what his public needs to think. Wouldn’t do to let them see their Lord at his most vulnerable, pry and peep at his tiny, sweat-soaked frame, worn down with unnamed flu or fever. They’d feast on it, if they could, make a meal of his humanity.

His knuckles whiten where they’re gripped around the edge of the sink. Porcelain. He huffs out a laugh; it’s a luxury which he might once have deemed gratuitous, but is now simply befitting. He clutches at the cold, smooth whiteness with the all the desperation of a dying man, and gives up, just for a moment, letting the wracking shivers overtake him. A thousand little burning spasms, up and down his spine, stinging just like stars might. He isn’t sure.

But, at the very least, he’s positive that something’s _wrong_ ; Hux’s shaky breaths are clouding the mirror, and despite this, there, through the humid fog, he can still see it: deep, plum-purple thumbprints smudged under his eyes, a gauntness to his cheeks that wasn’t there before. He looks peaked, a shadow of his normal self. His hair, oh _gods_ —

Emperors don’t get sick, but. Well. Perhaps this is something a little bit different, some pain humming in his bones, weighting them, that has a more to do with the painful persistent beating in his chest than any virus might.

Heartsickness. Emperor Hux is heartsick, and so incredibly struck with the enormity of the feeling that he’s quaking in his pajamas.

He simply can’t get that _look_ out of his head, the way that Ren’s gaze had seemed to slide right off him this morning, the way a blaster bolt glances off a shielded vessel. Like Hux _simply wasn’t there_. It makes him want to scream, tear something to absolute ribbons with nothing but his own pale, clawed hands. Hit Ren, then hit him again. Remind him of his existence, in the most basic possible language in the universe: _I’m here I’m here I’m here_ in the crack of knuckles on cheekbones, breath crushed from lungs with the force of his blows. Raven hair, torn and tangled, matted with the copper-salt of blood. His mouth drops open lustily, imaging the darkness of his leather gloves choking the everloving life from that white throat until Ren just _gives_.

Then Hux winces, rubbing at his jaw; last night, perhaps, he had overindulged. Just a bit. Maybe this— _sickness_ is punishment for a night spent fighting and fucking, rather than sleeping. The training in Hux says: Rest. You must rest. You need it, as all soldiers do.

So he does.

No fanfare, no traps of flushed skin and tender nakedness laid in wait to ensnare his Hound. Hux simply pulls the sheets over himself, curls up. Sleeps, with the same ease that the dead must.

He trembles, but only a little bit.

 

He dreams of the dry hiss of scales. Fangs, flashing in the coil of a muscle-fat and gleaming body, writhing, writhing. A snake, gobbling itself up from its very tail.

 

When he wakes, Ren is not there. Never was, if the placid sheets beside him are to be believed, and, somehow, Hux feels even worse that when he went to sleep. He spends the morning floating around the suite, head throbbing, purposefully turning off all the notifications on his datapad. Ignoring the screams of his generals and strategists and secretaries to wake up, to come to war. But there are no knocks on his door; no one dares to rouse the Emperor in person. They say that time waits for no man, and yet, perhaps, Hux has finally figured out how high he has to climb the ranks to make it wait for _him_.

He has no interest in eating, but decides to do something he hasn’t done in a very, very long time: take a bath. The hot water thunders from the taps as he props himself on the edge of the enormous, unused tub, fortifying his lungs with the heady steam, closing his eyes as he breathes. He remembers his mother, vaguely, doing something like this for him. The nostalgia of pale skin, turned flushed and splotchy with hot water. Her red hands, his red body: genetics. Hux comes from a line of people who must’ve lived in darkness, worked their whole lives in the artificial wombs of star destroyers and Empire fighters, washed out from the watery and weakened light of stars. His skin hasn’t known the light of a true sun, not for ten generations, and it shows in the blue veins in his translucent wrists, his lily-whiteness. Cave-dwellers, all of them. The blood of the Emperor, though Hux hates to admit it, has grown milky and thin; _perhaps,_ he thinks, sinking into the steaming tub, _there’s a method to thickening it_.

He settles in, chest, then shoulders, then neck, until his nose is grazing the waterline, breathing in a slow, humid hiss. He hums with the feeling; he didn’t fully understand how weary his bones had become under the weight of the crown, the weight of Ren, until this moment, and to be free of it is _bliss_.

So, with the galaxy on hold, Hux lays in his bath, mulling over the future with the kind deep and complex contemplation that only bathers can achieve. The chamber is silent, save for the drip of water, the gentle whisper of steam, and he’s General Hux once more.

Planning. Twisting, forming, milk and honey lineage tangled together into one single, solid braid.

This might work, says the General.

It _will_ work, says the Emperor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol i'm so blocked with this fic /: i'm so sorry for making everyone wait  
> comments welcome, as always! 
> 
> floatin-on-bespin.tumblr.com   
> come talk to me about OT3s man !

**Author's Note:**

> come join me @ floatin-on-bespin.tumblr.com so we can talk about bratty ginger emperors  
> comments very welcome, as always!
> 
> title taken from Kanye's album
> 
>  
> 
> [8-Tracks](http://8tracks.com/_100156/watch-the-throne)  
> 


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